Sunday, November 04, 2012

Another playthrough of NotoriouslyDB with Grieg and Sandy revealed yet another handful of bugs, but all were relegated to the bin by the time the night was out. I've even come up with an endgame of sorts that should fit in well with the style of game that it is.

End Game

I've tried to come up with a couple of viable endgame scenarios, but most either bred a deflated finish when one person pulled ahead in the power curve, or could be colluded a little too easily for my liking. The current endgame looks at sustained notoriety.

Each game will have a notoriety limit placed on it. Once somone passes this limit, they are eligible to win the next turn if they are not wiped and remain above the limit. Hopefully this should give people time to react against the current leader when they first break the win limit, but will become harder and harder to keep them (and eventually others) from winning.

From the playthrough tonight I'd expect a limit of 30-50 to be adequate as by then it feels like you have mastery over the village and can ramp up in power fairly easily. Lower limits will be more for advanced players as it will require more management to cram both the middle -> late phase transition and maneuvering for the end game into the same timeframe.

If it survives a couple more thought experiments, it should be relatively easy to implement and even automate.

Bounties

Another feature that made it into this revision was bounties. After a discussion with Andrew regarding the relative merits of the current system ("So, is it fun?"), it seemed that the game has become more than the testbed for high level play that I thought it would be. If the game were to be played in its own right, there needed to be another avenue to use treasure, especially when you know you are about to be wiped. I enjoyed having wipes "educate" people regarding the fleeting value of money compared to the real currency of space, but with bounties in place it feels like there is more of a multiplayer component, even if it's a "Hey! what was that for!" yelled out from the other side of the room.

Bounties are quite simple. Place a treasure amount against another player and that increases their notoriety by that amount next turn. The bounty is public, so that other can see not only who has the bounty, but who placed it too. I've been contemplating having a way to hide who placed it, but that will most likely be rolled into the Raid disguise update in the future. At least the variables are in place on the batabase to support it when the time comes.

Changelog

- Added bounties.
- Fixed attacks on other players
- Fixed defense with both elites and minions
- Fixed multiple player attacks on other players
- Added notoriety list to CharacterSubmission to see other player's notoriety. (This will be to make the game more, well, gamey, and give better feedback for the endgame)

There is still an issue with fortifications. I'm leaning toward an increasing scale of costs as 5 treasure seems fine at the start, but too little at the end.